Premium
Mooring Mobilities, Fixing Flows: Towards a Global Urban History of Port Cities in the Age of Steam
Author(s) -
Heerten Lasse
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1002/johs.12336
Subject(s) - port (circuit theory) , scholarship , mobilities , globality , globalization , economic geography , urbanization , the imaginary , historiography , sociology , urban studies , narrative , economy , political economy , political science , geography , economic growth , social science , economics , law , engineering , psychology , linguistics , philosophy , electrical engineering , psychotherapist
Abstract This article critically surveys the current historiography of port cities, which have recently attracted a lot of interest, particularly from global historians of the 19th and early 20th century. The article contextualizes this body of scholarship within larger recent and older trends in the discipline. Recently, historians and other scholars have predominantly analyzed port cities as “nodal points” or “hubs” within global networks. The article argues that these perspectives project spatial patterns defined by the imaginary of globalization today into the past, failing to acknowledge how tightly interwoven globalization and urbanization were in port cities during the age of steam. However, port cities can provide concrete narrative focal points to develop empirically‐grounded global histories, and remind us of the various efforts to control, limit, or prevent unsolicited forms of mobility and entanglement in the sites where these were moored or fixed. Finally, port cities can render the labor of the urban masses visible that facilitated the making of steam age connectivity and a globality anchored in the urban space of the ports.